Ejemplos de ERP

Since I have chosen to remain largely within the framework of the Golden Age in this chapter, I feel it is important to make a concession in this regard. The case made thus far is not intended to suggest that the producers of Golden Age superhero comic books refined the form to the level of great epic poetry produced by Homer but to suggest that they worked within confines of the great epic poets. At the same time, these producers, generally misunderstood by the critics devoted to the principles of the literate world, established the phrases that would become the formulae of great superhero comic book “epics” in years to come. As they did so, they were establishing a form that, by and large, contradicted the basic tenets of artistic standards established by the literate world. When discussing the tech-nical meaning of literacy, McLuhan complains about the common usage of the term literacy:

“[W]e live at a time when literacy itself has become so diluted that it can scarcely be invoked as an esthetic criterion” (The Gutenberg 2). Although the word didn’t have the exact meaning it would for a scholar of orality and literacy, it is important to recognize that superhero comic books were regularly dubbed products of an illiterate age (and the common definition of literacy is nevertheless based upon an idea of education and knowledge that privileges certain forms of the written word). Working with the standards set by high culture that portrayed the artist as one who transcends culture, critics of comic books certainly didn’t like what they considered to be the slavish way that publishers responded to their audience.

Seeming to violate the purity of inspiration, the source of the originality, and the litmus test for high art in a literate culture, comic books presented clichés from second- rate artists at best. One of the central ideas revealed by Parry and Lord was that the high art of Homer was essentially based upon the repetition, rearrangement, and redeployment of clichés. In reference to Parry’s work, Ong states the explicit threat that such studies posed to the literate estimation of art:

How could any poetry that was so unabashedly formulary, so constituted of prefabricated parts, still be good? ... There was no use denying the now known fact that the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained to dis-value, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier — to put it more bluntly, the cliché. [Orality 23].

While clichés are repeated bits of proverbial knowledge, such repetition in literate culture indicated meaninglessness (but in oral culture meant quite the opposite). Featuring men

who always saved the day, superhero comic books always reestablished basic cultural values through violent confrontation between superheroes and villains. Decrying the violence in comic strips, Ralph Bergengren would write, “physical pain is the most glaringly omnipresent of these motifs; it is counted upon invariably to amuse the average humanity of our called Christian civilization” (11). Invoking the higher values to which Christian civilization should aspire, Bergengren uses a Platonic framework that privileges literacy with an emphasis on the progress toward the truth provided by abstract thought. However, what “far- gone literates” call cliché is often proverbial knowledge related to the human lifeworld and basic needs of the tribe; within the practice of oral tradition, there was never a perceived need to rise above culture, and, instead, the stories vilified those things which threatened culture.

“In technological society today, the world has mostly left behind the old polemic and feudal oral- aural culture which had polarized knowledge, and with it the word, around struggles of heroic figures and thus (by today’s standards) had overcharged man’s life- world with virtue and vice” (Ong, The Presence 255).³⁸As a consequence, portrayals of heroes, not conscious or troubled by their acts of violence, often fed the widespread fears of parents as well intelligencia in years to come that culminated in part with the Fredric Wertham cam-paign and Congressional hearings on comic books. These fervent reactions serve to indicate how comic books occupy the position of low art and primal expression within a literature culture (and yet are widely accepted to the point that superhero stories persist and grow more vibrant).

In The Great Comic Book Heroes, the widespread acceptance of superhero stories is cap-tured well by Jules Feiffer’s recounting of his own experience with sarcasm: “My interest in comics began at the most sophisticated of levels, the daily newspaper strip, and thereafter proceeded downhill” (2–3).³⁹With Fieffer’s notion that “our reaction [to superheroes] was less ‘How original!’ than ‘But, of course!’” (9) in mind, we should carefully evaluate his subsequent description of superhero comic books as “junk.” Even though junk may be an inexact critical term, his general description of superhero comic books makes it a release from the expectations of industrial culture and allowed one to easily distinguish hero from villain. Implicated within the idea of literate culture, he calls comic book stories a lie but also identifies something central to the oral culture mentality of comic books in a literate world:

Children hungry for reasons, are seldom given convincing ones. They are bombarded with hard work labeled education.... It should come as no surprise, then, that within this shift-ing hodgepodge of external pressures, a child, simply to save his sanity, must go under-ground. Have a place to hide where he cannot be got at by grownups. A place that implies, if only obliquely, that they’re not so much; that they don’t know everything.... And the basic sustenance of this relief was, in my day, comic books. With them we were able to roam free, disguised in costume, committing the greatest of feats — and the worst of sins....

Psychically renewed, we could then return above ground and put up with another couple of days of victimization [Feiffer 76–77].

Ultimately, Feiffer is limited by his decision to not use critical language and by his ignorance of the literacy of the culture he resents, making his ironic humor even more bitter. Ostensibly, he yearns for rarified childhood but he really wants something other than the industrial age of literate culture. As Ong notes, the distinction between the storytelling and learning as work would only come in place with the advent of literacy:

In an oral culture, verbalized learning takes place quite normally in an atmosphere of cele-bration or play. As events, words are more celecele-brations and less tools than in literate

cul-tures. Only with the invention of writing and the isolation of the individual from the tribe will verbal learning and understanding itself become “work” as distinct from play, and the pleasure principle be downgraded as a principle of verbalized cultural continuity [The Pres-ence 29–30].

Although Feiffer places the tension between that of youth and adult culture, his descriptions work to describe the tension between that of oral and literate culture (with youth searching for an experience, not objective knowledge, that makes sense).⁴⁰

While my claims may be true and superhero comic book culture leads to a new oral culture, there are two significant issues left to address (the proverbial elephants in the room — please forgive the wholly appropriate use of a cliché). The first issue is the content of superhero comic books in the form of the superhero, itself. Although the popularity of other genres of comic books has begun to grow in United States (with comix in the 1960s and the black and white art comic book boom of the 1980s), the growth has been slow and the superhero is still dominant (in United States and around the world).⁴¹Even though this popularity could be explained through the continued success of a “known brand,” there was a point at which the superhero was the unknown and catapulted the medium to wild success.⁴² Regardless of the reasons why the superhero story is the most popular genre of comic books, it would be worth studying superhero comic books as the most prominent representation of this resurgence in oral culture. Nevertheless, although the superhero is not the sole pro-tagonist in all comic books in the world (with diverse genres represented in the Belgian and Manga traditions), I believe that the superhero story is more closely tied to oral nature of the medium than any other genre; the industrial basis for the proliferation of comic books differed in other major comic producing centers like France and Japan, and their major movements post- date the boom of the comic books and the superhero in the United States. Therefore, I would suggest that each of these movements are more clearly part of a secondary phase of comic book development (covered in the later chapters of this book) that allows for greater freedom of content. Regardless, based on the history covered in this chapter, I contend that form and content are integrally related and the superhero is the epic hero with some modern trappings. There is much more to be said on this topic, but I will reserve this for an in- depth discussion in chapter 3 on Superman’s continuing life as epic hero throughout the long run of his publication.⁴³As mentioned, there are two sig-nificant issues to address, and the content of superhero comic books was only the first prover-bial elephant in the room. The second issue is perhaps the most significant objection that could be leveled at superhero comic books: the visual orientation required by the print matter of the medium. Within my discussion of this issue, I will make a transition from the term orality to traditionality, in order to describe a set of recent practices related to the practices and thought of oral culture. I want to clarify that this is done to more accurately reflect the substance of what is being analyzed and not to avoid the salient issues that make the visual experience of superhero comic books part of an oral sensibility. In addition to demonstrating how the use of illustration invokes thought processes characteristic of oral culture, I will examine the various visual clichés that grow from the narrative clichés and formulae of superhero comic book illustrators. Since this discussion is very significant, it will be the exclusive purview of chapter 4. Finally, an important note should be added to clarify the focus on Golden Age comic books in this chapter; as already noted, I do not feel that the Golden Age represents the height of superhero stories, their maturity as epics. How-ever, even before the innovative work of Parry and Lord, the general idea existed that less sophisticated folk stories of oral culture lead to epic poetry, the height of oral tradition

achievement.⁴⁴Homer’s Odyssey would not exist without centuries of storytelling, elements that Homer repeated in performance. While much of what is produced in the Golden Age is crude, it also possesses great innovation as a type of oral art struggling to emerge within a literate culture (and therefore received sharper criticism than it should have). Moreover, it possesses great potential that led Silver Age creators, such as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, to refine the “phrases” of this artform in more readily employed formulae; this will be dealt with in chapter 5.

The primary goal of this chapter has been to identify the parallels between the oral culture and the conventions of the superhero comic book industry (and the culture it pro-duced). Paradoxically, this is something that can be accomplished because of the existence of a literate culture that records the history of the industry in which this new form of primary oral culture emerges. While it would be much easier to regard it as a phenomenon of secondary orality, I want to again make clear that the early years of the comic book indus-try should be understood as something very like primary orality. As I will show in chapters 6, 7, and 8, the industry and art seem to enter the world of secondary orality only much later in the long life of the superhero, beginning in the 1960s and only wholeheartedly in the 1980s, because of changes in technology and the marketplace. Consequently, this chapter is exclusively about the industry and culture that leads to the Golden Age superhero. Because of the performance constraints of the creators, the practices and attitudes of the creators, and the corporate ownership of their creations that spins outward, the development of super-heroes takes place in a culture remarkably like that of primary orality. As a consequence, superhero stories are not commodities driven solely by a 20th- century industry that is shaped by executives basing their ideas on surveys of popular culture (although aside from the term

“commodities,” most of this statement is true). Instead, they are dynamic forces that interact with a commercial market and, more importantly, operate as a powerful voice that harkens to a different sort of community organization; superhero comic books interact with culture, mirroring and shaping culture within America and beyond, revealing itself not so much as an empty marketing vessel but as an evocation of the mechanics of the traditional epic poetry.